PLEASE NOTE THAT PROOF OF FULL VACCINATION IS REQUIRED TO ATTEND THIS EVENT, AND EVERYONE 2 YEARS OF AGE AND OLDER MUST WEAR A MASK AT ALL TIMES WHILE IN THE BUILDING.
The acclaimed musicians Maggie Rogers and Questlove will join the New Yorker staff writer Kelefa Sanneh for The New Yorker Live’s first in-person event. They’ll discuss their music and greatest influences, as well as Rogers’s studies at Harvard Divinity School and Questlove’s career with the Roots. Rogers, a former student of Questlove’s, will also perform several songs from her recently released sophomore album, “Surrender.” To begin the evening, the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu will tell a story adapted from his upcoming memoir, “Stay True,” about how befriending—and losing—someone who listened to the “wrong” kind of music changed his life.
The event at Symphony Space is now sold out. To add your name to a waiting list for in-person tickets click here.
A live stream of the event will be available exclusively to New Yorker subscribers. Become a subscriber to enjoy this exclusive benefit and more, including access to recordings of all past New Yorker Live events in the series archive.
Bios:
Maggie Rogers is a songwriter, producer, and performer. She graduated from New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, where she took a course co-taught by Questlove, and received a 2019 Grammy nomination for Best New Artist after the release of her début album, “Heard It in a Past Life.” In 2020, she enrolled at Harvard Divinity School, where she received a master’s degree in religion and public life. Likened by the New Yorker pop critic Amanda Petrusich to both Joni Mitchell and Smokey Robinson, Rogers released her sophomore album, “Surrender,” in July.
Ahmir (Questlove) Thompson is a musician, d.j., producer, author, and filmmaker. In 1987, he and Tariq (Black Thought) Trotter co-founded the influential hip-hop group the Roots, with which he continues to perform. He is also the music director for “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” where Roots members make up the house band. Questlove has received six Grammy Awards and won the 2022 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for “Summer of Soul,” about Black music and the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. He and Trotter co-founded the media company Two One Five Entertainment, which developed the documentary series “Hip-Hop: The Songs That Shook America” and will release a biopic of Sly Stone directed by Questlove. Questlove has published books including “Mo’ Meta Blues,” “Creative Quest,” and, most recently, “Music Is History,” which traces the evolution of American music over the past half century. He was the subject of a Profile in The New Yorker in 2012, and was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People this year.
Kelefa Sanneh has contributed to The New Yorker since 2001 and has been a staff writer since 2008. He is also a contributor to “CBS Sunday Morning.” He came to the magazine from the New York Times, where he had been the pop-music critic since 2002. Previously, he was the deputy editor of Transition, a journal of race and culture based at Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute. Last year, he published his first book, “Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres,” to critical acclaim.
Hua Hsu has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2017. He teaches at Bard College. He is the author of “A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific” and will release a memoir, “Stay True,” in September.
All programming is subject to change.
Illustration by João Fazenda.
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